Iosi Havilio - Open Door

I put on the first thing I could find, a long jumper with buttons, a kind of cardigan. I lit a cigarette and went into the kitchen in bare feet, shivering. Jaime had his back to me, trying to hurry the kettle to a boil. I grabbed a chair and dragged it back needlessly, to attract his attention, but Jaime didn’t turn round. I spoke first.

‘You’re back early.’

‘They brought me back,’ he says, ‘the truck broke down on the way.’

‘And how did it go?’

‘It was a fiasco,’ he says and turns round, with the same expression as always, a bit paler than usual with a nervous laugh biting his lips. He doesn’t look at me, he talks to the kettle which is now steaming.

‘That guy is a swindler,’ he says and I can’t help laughing.

‘A swindler,’ I repeat quietly, ‘that’s funny.’

‘Not to me,’ grumbles Jaime, ‘he makes me drive 200 kilometres on a fool’s errand and to crown it all we’re left stranded in the middle of the road.’

Jaime’s language is old-fashioned, provincial, sometimes I forget that he’s a country boy and that, by now, I must be a country boy’s girl. A new generation of country girls.

‘And the kid …?’ he finally brings himself to ask, gesturing towards the bedroom with his chin.

‘It’s Eloísa, the girl from the shop.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘We were chatting until late, and I told her she could stay here, she’s just a kid.’ I don’t know why I add the last part, it wasn’t necessary. Jaime lifts his chin once more to indicate the bedroom as if to say: Oh right, or well, well, or even: Is the girl going to be in my bed for long? When he’s lost for words, Jaime points with his chin to complete his sentence, as if he’s neighing.

Grudgingly, Jaime says we’ll wait until morning, there’s no point in waking her and making her leave at this time of night. Not entirely convinced, he goes and slumps in the armchair next to the chimney. Eloísa is sitting on the bed waiting for me, in a Buddha position.

‘Get dressed and go, Jaime’s back, he’s in the next room,’ I say and she throws herself on top of me, tickling me. Leave, I tell her, and half joking, half serious, I give her a kick which knocks her out of bed. And, from the floor, naked, unabashed, she laughs like a loony. She opens her legs and shows me everything. She mocks: Get dressed and go, imitating my voice and she throws herself on top of me again. She sits on my back and grips my wrists as if she has the strength to pin me down. I let her defeat me although I say, just for the sake of it: OK, Eloísa, that’s enough. And she repeats in a commanding voice, the most serious she can summon: OK, Eloísa, that’s enough. Now she lets me go and gets back under the sheets, she quietens down. Then I turn over and grab her head so hard that I surprise myself and bury it between my legs. She freezes slightly, I guide her, I teach her. She learns quickly, and she practises, for the rest of the night, until it gets light. Do you like it? she asks quietly, and I grit my teeth. Jaime doesn’t show his face again, or at least I don’t see him.

Eloísa stays for breakfast. We drink mugs of maté and eat bread with butter and sugar.

‘I like horses too, we had one until recently, it was half mine and half my brother’s. We called it Tato, after a mad uncle who lives in Misiones, but my old man sold it to pay off some debts at the shop,’ says Eloísa and Jaime looks at her as though he wants her far away.

Come with me to the gate, Eloísa asks in my ear. Once we are a reasonable distance from the house, she grabs my hand, trying to interlace her fingers with mine, she says nothing, nor do I, there’s no need. Before going through the gate, she kisses me quickly on the lips.

‘I had a great time, thank you,’ she says, and I can’t quite believe she said thank you.

Jaime and Boca spend all day fixing the pick-up, one underneath, between the wheels, the other with his head buried in the engine. I tend to the house, I sweep, I cook, I make the bed, like an automaton. To get Eloísa out of my head, I lie down in a deck chair with Brenda’s pages and start reading at random, without paying too much attention, as if praying.

‘Open Door is built in the middle of the Luján plain, not far from a famous cathedral, the best-known pilgrimage site in Argentina. The establishment is divided into two distinct parts: on one side, the central asylum, which holds the administrative and hospital services, and houses for patients under full-time surveillance or in temporary isolation; on the other side, the open door and agricultural work colony.

‘No walls restrict the horizon, nothing to limit the illusion of absolute liberty. The establishment is composed of fourteen separate blocks, rooms, workshops, kitchens and offices, whose white facades and red roofs are scattered happily through the green countryside. The interior is just as cheerful as the exterior: corridors and verandas with white walls, floor tiles of different colours and flowers at the windows. From the open blocks comes the sound of songs and gramophone orchestras. It is hard to imagine a working establishment more perfect than this.’

‘That’s it sorted, it was the carburettor,’ says Jaime, coming into the kitchen, and adds: ‘I don’t want you to see that girl anymore, the one from the shop. That kind of girl brings trouble.’

Later that same day, Eloísa asks me whether I’ve tried ket. Ketamine, she says and I laugh. We laugh. We’re sitting on the bank of the stream, her behind me, scratching my back underneath my blouse. Have you never tried it? Not even out of curiosity? My friends, she says, take it when they go dancing.

Curled up by the chimney, I pass the time hypnotised by the fire, spellbound. My eyes follow the path of the flames. It’s crazy, the way everything changes, so quickly, so imperceptibly. And by the time I’ve registered it, there it is, it’s already changed. There are those first timid flames that need to be revived by blowing, then the powerful ones that wrap around trunks and branches, from the smallest to the largest, the thinnest to the thickest. Each flame follows its own path. Sometimes, for some reason that escapes me, the fire swirls and forms corkscrews that come and go from yellow to red, so frenziedly. And they hollow out the wood, forming eyes in it. But from a distance, the most fascinating, beautiful, and at the same time terrible part is the moment of destruction. The burning wood splitting into two, falling into pieces, turning into smoke. They are tiny catastrophes, homemade, controlled, miniature cataclysms. Jaime is standing in silence behind me. He’s watching too.

Away from the fire and its charms, the truth is that it’s brutally cold and if we don’t move away from the chimney it’s because we can’t bear to be in the rest of the house. The kitchen is freezing and we can’t even bring ourselves to enter the bedroom, it’s almost certainly worse.

‘A rat,’ Jaime says suddenly, his voice changed, rather hoarse, so much so that I have to turn round because I’m not sure I’ve heard correctly.

‘What?’

‘A rat,’ he repeated, slightly irritated and, despite not having seen anything resembling a rat, I climb onto a chair, just in case, it seems like the obvious thing to do. Jaime took a shotgun off the wall and pointed it downwards, in every direction, towards the armchair, the door, the chimney, always downwards. I took a moment to react, mainly because I could have sworn that the gun was purely decorative. Jaime continued with his hunt, his face red and overwhelmed. I still hadn’t worked out whether this was a joke or not. To further confuse me, Jaime talked to it, to the rat, about all sorts of things. He talked to it more than he’d spoken to me all day. He was saying: Come out, you bastard, come out of there, you lousy bastard, and he stamped and kicked the furniture, he tried to make it move but the rat didn’t reveal itself. Jaime kept going for some time, so long that I began to get bored perching on the chair, and I sat down and started watching the fire again. At one point, I looked behind me and my eyes met Jaime’s as if to ask him: Are you sure you saw a rat? But he averted his gaze immediately, he was engrossed in this opponentless duel, his gun still pointing at the floor, although carelessly now, without precision.